Alan Turing — "Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from bo…"
Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Alan Turing
"At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control."
"The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life."
"The human brain has a finite number of states, and so it can be simulated by a finite state machine."
"A computer is a universal machine. It can do anything that can be described as a computation."
"The future of computing is in artificial intelligence."
Details
Widely attributed, likely from a lecture or informal comment.
Date: Unknown, likely 1940s-1950s
PhilosophicalVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: gemini
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Technical skills like programming develop through repetition and real-world exposure, not passive reading. You learn by writing actual code, debugging real problems, and studying how others solved similar challenges. Textbooks provide structure but cannot substitute for the intuition built through trial, error, and direct observation. The knowledge that sticks comes from wrestling with live problems, not memorizing abstract principles on a page.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing was a builder, not just a theorist. He designed the Bombe codebreaking machine at Bletchley Park, personally wrote programs for the Manchester Mark 1, and authored the ACE computer proposal at NPL through hands-on experimentation. He was largely self-taught in key areas and learned cryptanalysis by doing. His Turing Test is empirical rather than philosophical — his breakthroughs consistently came from tinkering, not classroom study.
The era
In the 1940s and early 1950s, computer science had no textbooks — the discipline was being invented in real time. At Bletchley Park and Manchester, programmers learned entirely by experimenting on actual hardware. No universities offered computing degrees and no curriculum existed. Knowledge spread through direct mentorship and examining colleagues' work, making Turing's observation less a bold claim than a straightforward description of the only method available to the field's pioneers.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].